Ice Diaries by Lexi Revellian

… or perhaps the Snowmobile Fairy gave it to him.
    “I was travelling on it. I ran
out of petrol and had to walk, that’s when you found me. I
collected it yesterday.”
    “Why didn’t you bring it to
Bézier? Why hide it here?”
    “In case I was followed.” I
raised my eyebrows. “By Mike and the gang. I didn’t want
to leave a trail to your door.”
    “Why would they follow you?”
    “It’s kind of involved. I
guess there’s no reason not to tell you. Mike threw me out. He
gave me a clapped out Lynx with a full tank and told me not to come
back. I didn’t go quietly.”
    “Why did Mike throw you out?”
    Morgan paused before saying, “We
had a disagreement.”
    “Is that how you got the knife
cut?”
    Morgan’s eyes became opaque for a
moment. “Yes. After that, two of his goons went with me for a
couple of hours, to make sure I left. I was mad as hell. When they’d
gone I waited till dark and turned around – I had enough petrol
to get most of the way back. I took Mike’s snow machine.”
    “This one?”
    “Yeah. It’s a 600 ACE
Ski-doo, the best one we had. And I drained the petrol out of the
other machines, and emptied the spare cans on to the snow. We were in
the middle of nowhere, camped in a church bell tower. They’d
have had to go on foot back to the last place we found petrol to
fetch more. I figured by the time they’d done that, my tracks
would have been covered by fresh snow.”
    I was getting a bad feeling about this.
“It’s hardly snowed for the past week, till last night.”
    “No. Unlucky, that.”
    “But even if you took his best
snowmobile, is that worth Mike chasing you to get it back? He’s
presumably found the Lynx where you left it. Okay, I can see you gave
them a lot of trouble with the petrol and he wouldn’t be
pleased, but the sensible thing for him to do would be to say good
riddance, cut his losses and move on.”
    Uneasily, I remembered Morgan saying
Mike was a psycho. Maybe he didn’t do sensible. Maybe he had
really, really liked his 600 ACE Ski-doo. It was a nice machine.
Morgan sat there, silent, and I had a disagreeable feeling there was
more, and it was worse, and he was deciding whether to tell me. I
waited, unreasonably apprehensive, reminding myself it wasn’t
my problem. Finally he spoke, avoiding my eyes.
    “It’s not just the sled. I
took the gold too. All of it.”
    Silence fell while the significance of
this information sank in. “So – there were eight of
you … and you’d all worked for the best part of a year
amassing this gold. Digging down to jewellers, blowing up safes. And
you stole the lot.” I stared at him. “Were you insane?”
    He darted a look at me. “I was
angry. I wasn’t thinking straight.”
    “That has to be the
understatement of the century. Because those seven men –”
    “Six men and a woman.”
    “– whatever, those seven
are going to be in total agreement about tracking you down to get
back the stolen gold. They’ll probably agree about beating you
to a pulp afterwards, too. If you’d just taken your share,
okay, Mike might have wanted to get his Ski-doo back, but he’d
have had trouble getting the others to care. As it is, they’ll
all be thirsting for your blood. And any minute now, they could be
here.”
    I looked out of the window to the
north, half expecting to see seven ominous and growing black dots on
the horizon. I didn’t want any of us to get caught up in a
showdown between Morgan and Mike’s gang, and that seemed a real
possibility if – when – they turned up in a London with
no law. I didn’t want them to know we’d been harbouring
him for fear they got nasty with us. Morgan appeared to guess my
thoughts.
    “I was going to leave tomorrow.
But I’m nearly ready, I’ll go today – this
afternoon. Get out of your way. I’ve just got to find one or
two other things I need, rope up the trailer and I’ll be off.
Okay, it’s bad luck about the snow, they’d have been able
to follow